Gunfire Hits Girl In Wheelchair

November 17, 1986|By JONATHAN SUSSKIND, Staff Writer

LAUDERHILL -- A fight that may have started over a hat erupted into gunfire at Lauderhill Mall Club Apartments on Saturday night and a wheelchair-bound 14-year-old girl who couldn`t get out of the line of fire was critically wounded by a stray bullet.

Shannon Lanique Blaylock, afflicted with polio and a curved spine since age 2, is expected to recover but was in intensive care at Plantation General Hospital on Sunday.

Witnesses said the active, popular teenager nicknamed ``Dimples`` was with friends in the parking lot in front of an apartment block at 1194 N. State Road 7 when the fight between six or eight unidentified youths started shortly before 10 p.m.

``They were arguing over a hat, a $5 hat that you get at the flea market,`` said an angry Bennie Fulmore, 19, who moved the stricken girl quickly out of the way after she was shot.

``At this point we don`t know what the fight was about,`` said Broward Sheriff`s Office spokesman Jim Leljedal. ``One person said they were arguing over hats but we don`t know whether to put any credence in that or not. It is an area where drug use and trafficking are not unheard of.``

Leljedal said it was not known how many guns and shots were fired. But witnesses said there were several guns and between 8 and 12 shots.

Shannon was chatting with friends when the shooting started. Bystanders ducked but Shannon couldn`t wheel her chair out of the way fast enough, several witnesses said. The bullet hit her upper left chest, missing her heart by only a half-inch, and lodging in her shoulder, said her mother, Lynn Blaylock.

``I was on the ground and she said, `I`m shot, I`m shot,` `` said her friend Frances Ramos, 18, who was a few yards away. ``I said, `Call the ambulance, they shot Dimples.` ``

Fulmore said he raced the girl in her wheelchair to the nearby rental office and stayed with her until the ambulance arrived. The fighting youths, who had four ``big guns,`` fled in a maroon Toyota hatchback, he said.

Shannon`s mother ran screaming from her nearby apartment and saw blood staining her only child`s chest.

``I heard the shots and I said Dimples has been shot . . . I just felt it,`` said Blaylock, 29, a motel maid.

Only a short while before, she had told her independent-minded daughter not to hang out at night in the parking lot of the complex, which has recently been the scene of other shootings, beatings and drug deals.

Shannon told her mother to tell Fulmore that he had saved her life by rushing her out of the battleground while several bullets still flew.

Born in Augusta, Ga. and a Broward County resident for two years, Shannon was stricken with paralysis in her legs after a bad cold and has had to use a wheelchair to get around since about two years ago, Lynn Blaylock said. Her friends and family said her affliction never stops her and she is popular in her ninth-grade class at Dillard High School

``She says she wants to work with computers and be a secretary,`` her mother said. One of her favorite activities is rap music, and she`s so good at it that at school dances she earned a second nickname: Wheelchair Player.

A friend said Shannon`s humor helped after the shooting.

``She told the ambulance lady, `Now you go fast, but don`t put on the brakes the wrong way,`` said Lynette Brown, 18. ``She`s strong. She has that willpower. She just remained calm.``

Residents of the 324-unit complex said they were outraged. They said drug- dealing, gun-firing and other crimes are getting too common. At the end of October, the manager was beaten and robbed.

``I`m sick of these young bucks shooting around here,`` said Joyce Smith, 28. ``I have three kids and my son was coming back from McDonalds when they were shooting. He said, `Mama, I`m lucky I ducked.` ``

Smith said she was going to ask the Broward County Housing Authority, which subsidizes about a third of the apartments, including hers, to move her out.

The incident was reminiscent of the Aug. 14 slaying of a 7-year-old girl and wounding of three others during a gun battle between West Palm Beach street gangs. Two men were arrested after that crime.

``These American people -- shooting all the time,`` said Shannon`s stepfather, Alvin Walcutt, a Jamaican living here two years. ``They just can`t live like that. The kids are just like the big ones -- fools.``

After seeing her daughter Sunday afternoon, Blaylock said, ``I feel much better, but she says she`s in pain. They keep sticking her with needles. She said, `Mama, why did it have to happen to me?` ``